A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code • Hacker News Board

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#151

Post by firtoz » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:04 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it. Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.) Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

It's very marmite. I used to hate it when it was vscode's crappy copilot. Now with Cursor and Windsurf, after some onboarding, I find it indispensable. I have used AI for coding for 3 separate roles: - freelancer - CTO - employee

And in all 3 cases, AI has increased my productivity, and I could ship things even when I'm really sleepy or if I have very little time between things, I can send a prompt to an agent and then review things, and then when I have more time, I can clean up some of the mess.

Now my stance is really at "Whoever doesn't take advantage of it is NGMI"

You're specifically very wrong at "LLM's cannot do: following a formal spec in a particular problem domain". It does take skill to ensure that they will, though, for sure.

TLDR: Skill issue

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#152

Post by throwaway_0351 » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:06 AM UTC

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

I see worrying trends in my office.

Developers (often juniors) use LLM code without taking time to verify it. This leads to bugs and they can't fix it because they don't understand the code. Some senior developers also trust the tool to generate a function, and don't take the time to review it and catch the edge cases that the tool missed.

They rely on ChatGPT to answer their questions instead of taking time to read the documentation or a simple web search to see discussions on stack overflow or blogs about the subject. This may give results in the short term, but they don't actually learn to solve problems themselves. I am afraid that this will have huge negative effects on their career if the tools improve significantly.

Learning how to solve problems is an important skill. They also lose access to the deeper knowledge that enable you to see connections, complexities and flows that the current generation of tools are unable to do. By reading the documentation, blogs or discussions you are often exposed to a wider view of the subject than the laser focused answer of ChatGPT

There will be less room for "vibe coders" in the future, as these tools increasingly solve the simple things without requiring as much management. Until we reach AGI (I doubt it will happen within the next 10 years) the tools will require experienced developers to guide them for the more complex issues. Older experienced developers, and younger developers who have learned how to solve problems and have deep knowledge, will be in demand.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#153

Post by vidarh » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:06 AM UTC

throwaway_0351 wrote: post #145

tippytippytango wrote: post #120

I prefer just paying for metered use on every request. I hope monthly fees don’t carry over from the last era of tech. It’s fine to charge consumers $10 per month. But once it’s over $50 let’s not pretend you are hoping I under utilize the service, and you want me to think I’m over utilizing it. These premium subscriptions are too much for me to pretend that math doesn’t exist.

Back when I used dial-up, I experienced a lot of stress when I was connected. I felt I had to be as effective as possible, because we had to pay for every minute spent. When I switched to DSL the stress went away, and I found myself using internet in different ways than before, because I could explore freely without time pressure. I think this applies to Claude as well. I will probably feel more free to experiment if…

My first use of the internet was dial-up e-mail only exchange via UUCP to a local BBS that exchanged mail every 6 hours (might have been 4), and so to be as effective as possible, I'd prepare all my e-mails including mails to the e-mailweb gateway at CERN so I could exchange a big batch right before the time slot. Often their exchange took long enough that if I sent the messages to the CERN bot first, I'd get the response included when I downloaded the replies after they'd exchanged with their upstream. Then I had a 6 hour window to figure out what to include in the next batch...

100% with you that how you access something can add constraints and stress - in my case there while we paid per minute, the big factor was the time windows. To maximise utility you wanted to include something useful in as many of the exchanges as possible.

With Claude Code as it is now, I often clear context more often than ideal because it will drive up cost. I could probably add a lot more details to CLAUDE.md in my repos, but it'll drive up tokens as well.

Some of it I'll still do because it affects speed as well, but it'll be nice not to have to pay attention to it.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#154

Post by sramam » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:18 AM UTC

throwaway_0351 wrote: post #152

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

I see worrying trends in my office. Developers (often juniors) use LLM code without taking time to verify it. This leads to bugs and they can't fix it because they don't understand the code. Some senior developers also trust the tool to generate a function, and don't take the time to review it and catch the edge cases that the tool missed. They rely on ChatGPT to answer their questions instead of taking time to read…

Aren't the insufficiencies of the LLMs a temporary condition?

And as with any automation, there will be a select few who will understand it's inner workings, and a vast majority that will enjoy/suffer the benefits.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#155

Post by vidarh » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:20 AM UTC

tkzed49 wrote: post #34

ramoz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve spent over $1,000 on Claude Code at this point and the return is worth it. The spend feels cheap compared to output. In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.

hey, I'm open to that possibility. Maybe I'll grab $5 in API credit and give it a shot (for 5 minutes or a week depending on who you ask)

A couple of tips if you're just starting with it:

The two worst ways of burning API credits I've found with Claude Code are:

1. Getting argumentative/frustrated with the model if it goes off the rails and continuing to try to make something work when the model isn't getting anywhere.

If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? If it's not making forward progress after a couple of prompts, it's not likely to unless you split up the task and/or provide more details. This is how you burn $10 instead of $0.60 for a task that "should" be simple. It's bad at telling you something is hard.

2. Think about when you either /compact (trims the context but retains important details) or clear the context entirely. E.g. always clear when moving to another task unless they're closely related. Letting it retain a long context is a surefire way of burn through a lot (and it also slows you down a lot, not least because there's a bug that affects some of us - maybe related to TERM settings? no idea - where in some cases it will re-print the entire history to the terminal, so between tasks it's useful to quit and restart)

Also use /init, but also ask it to update CLAUDE.md with lessons learned regularly. It's pretty good at figuring things out, such as how my custom ORM for a very unusual app server I'm working on works, but it's a massive waste of tokens to have it re-read the ORM layer every time instead of updating CLAUDE.md.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#156

Post by easyThrowaway » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it. Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.) Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

It depends on what you consider "coding".

For me it's mainly adding quick and dirty hooks to Wordpress websites from berating marketing c-suits for websites that are gonna disappear or never visited anymore in less than a few months.

For that, whatever Claude spits out is more than enough. I'm reasonably confident I'm not going to write much better code in the less-than-30-minutes I'm allowed to spend to fix whatever issue comes up.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#157

Post by vidarh » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:26 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #66

keerthiko wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i got $100 of credit at the start of the year, and have been using +1$ each month, starting at $2 in january using aider at the time. just switched to claude code this week, since it follows a similar UX. agentic CLI code assist really has been growing in usefulness for me as i get faster at reviewing its output. i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documenta…

What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me). AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentatio…

I tested Aider a few times, and gave up because at the time it was so bad - it might be time to try it again, and I'll add that my experience with seeing how Claude Code works for me while lots of other people struggle with it suggests to me that my experience with Aider might well be that my style of working just meshes better with Claude Code than Aider.

Claude Code was the first assistant that gelled for me, and I use it daily. It wrote the first pass of multi-monitor support for my window manager. It's written the last several commits of my Ruby X11 bindings, including a working systray example, where it both suggested the whole approach and implemented it, and tested it with me just acting as a clicking monkey (because I haven't set up any tooling to let it interact with the GUI) when it ran test scripts.

I think you just needs to test the two side by side and see what works for you.

I intend to give Aider a go at some point again, as I would love to use an open source tool for this, but ultimately I'll use the one that produces better results for me.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#158

Post by jagged-chisel » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:27 AM UTC

throwaway_0351 wrote: post #152

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

I see worrying trends in my office. Developers (often juniors) use LLM code without taking time to verify it. This leads to bugs and they can't fix it because they don't understand the code. Some senior developers also trust the tool to generate a function, and don't take the time to review it and catch the edge cases that the tool missed. They rely on ChatGPT to answer their questions instead of taking time to read…

> They rely on ChatGPT to answer their questions instead of taking time to read the documentation or a simple web search.

Documentation is not written with answers in mind. Every little project wants me to be an expert in their solution. They want to share with me the theory behind their decisions. I need an answer now.

Web search no longer provides useful information within the first few results. Instead, I get content farms who are worse than recipe pages - explaining why someone would want this information, but never providing it.

A junior isn’t going to learn from information that starts from the beginning (“if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”) 99.999% of them need a solution they can tweak as needed so they can begin to understand the thing.

LLMs are good at processing and restructuring information so I can ask for things the way I prefer to receive them.

Ultimately, the problem is actually all about verification.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#159

Post by Dlemo » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:27 AM UTC

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

I think it's an enabler for everyone.

So many people benefit from basic things like sorting tables, searching and filtering data etc.

Things were I might just use excel or a small script, they can now use an LLM for it.

And for now, we are still in dire need for more developers and not less. But yes I can imagine that after a golden phase of 5-15 years it will start to go down to the bottom when automaisation and ai got too good / better than the avg joe.

Nonetheless a good news is also that coding LLMs enable researchee too. People who often struggle learning to code.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#160

Post by mr_mitm » Fri, May 09, 2025, 9:38 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it. Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.) Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

I don't know. The other day I wanted to display an Active Directory object to the user. The dict had around 20 keys like "distinguishedname" and the "createdat" with timestamps like 144483738. I wanted friendly display names in a sensible order and have binary values converted to human readable values.

Very easy to do, sure, but the LLM did this in one minute, recognized the context and correctly converted binary values where as this would have taken me maybe 30 minutes of looking up standards and docs and typing in friendly key names.

I also told it to create five color themes and apply them to the CSS. It worked on the first attempt and it looks good, much better than what I could have had produced by thinking of themes, picking colors and copying RGB codes back and forth. Also I'm not fluent in CSS.

Though I wasn't paid for this, it's a hobby project, which I wouldn't have started in the first place without an LLM performing the boring tedious tasks.